archive for 2007
The fifth season of The Wire will apparently start on December 6th, aces. The site also lists five of the teasers that must be airing on HBO in the US.
This guy is a genius. His SMTP server has a customised welcome message which includes a URL to a page of disclaimers that override any of those stupid signature disclaimer messages.
Open Social, the future of social networks? Certainly looks promising.
Edinburgh Council have a “Citizen’s Account” area on their website. I registered so that I could view and pay my council tax bills online. The process had been surprisingly painless until I came to add my council tax account number. I was presented with this stellar piece of form design:
Ignoring the incredibly sloppy layout bugs, it doesn’t look so bad, until you actually read the text:
Your account number is an 8 digit number which forms part of the 11 digit number to be found in the top right hand corner of your Council Tax demand. Please ignore the first digit and the last two digits of the 11 digit number. For example, if the number shown on your Council Tax demand is 91234567807, please enter 12345678.
(my emphasis)
Why, why, why are they making the user jump through hoops when entering a simple number? Why isn’t all this stupid number truncating done by the server? Entering an 11 digit account number (only once I notice) can be difficult enough without having to do a number puzzle on the data first. Council, you must try harder.
Very interesting interview with book jacket designer extraordinarire Mr Chip Kidd. My good buddies Ian and (the awesome) Jed bought me Chip Kidd’s gorgeous Book One last Christmas, it is supremely shiny.
I keep catching bits of Californication on TV and it always seems great. Last nights episode was called “LOL” and had Hank (Duchovny) bitching about the decline of decent spoken english, very topical. It also featured this great exchange:
Hank: “B” to the “I” to the double “L”. What’s up, my nig nog?
Bill: I need to talk to you.
Hank: Well, you should have called. I wouldn’t have answered, but you could’ve left a message, which I would have quickly erased.
OK, maybe it was funnier in context. You’ve just got to imagine the half-awake, hungover, dead-pan of Duchovy’s delivery.
My good buddy Ian (dude, fix your website) recently put me onto the incredibly fast-paced “zero punctuation” video reviews done by a fellow Brit living in Australia. With his dead-pan voice over and accompanying stick figure animation he manages to brilliant summarise some of the latest games, as well as get in plenty of sight gags and pithy commentary. Here is his review of Valve’s Orange Box:
So I all moved into my new place. The move was pretty painless, mainly thanks to the help of my Mum and Dad who came up for the weekend. My Dad drove a van we had hired and we got everything shifted fin two trips. Got my ADSL from Be activated within about four days and after some firmware updating shenanigans with the modem I’m all up and rocking. I did manage to trash my desktop PC in the moving process though, so I’m taking it as an excuse to upgrade to an uber-rig. I’m getting a dual core Pentium and 2 gigs of RAM (which is crazy cheap at the moment). Check out some quick snaps I took of my new place on flickr.
Mark, Al and myself are all in misty London for the Future of Web Apps conference which has been pretty good so far. Apart from the 4am wakeup and 6:30am flight from Edinburgh. We’ll see how long we last at the party tonight which has free adobe-sponsored beer…
Playing:
Bioshock
Gorgeous visual, gorgeous sound design, brilliant voice acting, almost real moral choices. Runs like a dog on my aging PC but is still an amazing game.
Quake Wars: Enemy Territory
Also runs like a dog on my “rig” but is very fast and fun, in the same vein as the original Enemy Territory. Similar to Battlefield 2, but then also very different – more arcadey. It also has the usual technical/gameplay polish of all the iD/Splash Damage games.
Team Fortress 2
The very, very late sequel to the original Team Fortress is now in beta and it is one heck of a lot of fun. Inspired visuals (cell shaded cartoon style) give it a whole new take and makes it a different kind of game. The slightly simplified graphics also help to make it fly along on my PC.
Watching:
Heroes Season 2
From the first episode it is certainly looking promising and just as good as season one. From the upcoming guest star gossip it also sounds like there is a lot more fun to come.
The Wire Season One
I watched the entirety of The Wire “off the internet” and now I’ve started buying the DVD boxsets because it is so damn good. Possibly one of the finest cop shows ever.
Madmen
A new show created by one of the writers of The Sopranos about the lives of the “madmen” – the Madison Avenue ad (as in advertising) men in the 1960s. Interesting period stuff which is covering a lot of the changing social aspects of American life.
I have a new flat! Kerry and I have amicably decided to split up and so for the last month or so I’ve been looking for a new place. I finally found a nice play on Causewayside in the Newington area of Edinburgh. It’s a good bright flat in a decent area of town and has been refurbished recently with new fittings. I’ll be properly moving all my stuff in two weeks but in the mean time I’ve got to buy all that fun stuff like: duvet, cushions, decent curtains etc. I’ve never lived on my own before, it’ll be nice to do whatever I want, whenever I want!
Does it come in black?
Good grief! Coudal’s photoshop tennis has returned! Now re-named as “Layer Tennis”. It feels like an awfully long time since the last one, and I’m certainly looking forward to Shaun Inman vs Kevin Cornell on friday.
“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”
Somehow doesn’t seem as catchy as the previous titles. I’m sure it’ll grow on me.
I think there is a two week delay between stuff happening and me blogging it. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago Kerry and I were at the (brand new) Connect Festival in Inveraray on the west coast of Scotland. Here are some good points:
- Awesome lineup, including Bjork, Beastie Boys, Regina Spektor, Big Star, Teenage Fanclub, Divine Comedy and on and on…
- Excellent food
- Nice vibe
- Smaller crowd than T in the Park
Here are some not so good things:
- The mud! The horror!
- 8 washbasins for 4000 people? I kid not
- Campsite on a sloping bumpy field seemingly infested with spiders
But they’re all pretty minor, I mean, you don’t have to wash for three days.
There is a metric ass-load of photos on my flickr steam.
I saw Foo Fighters supported by Nine Inch Nails and the Silver Sun Pickups at Meadowbank the other week. It was part of T on the Fringe – the music part of the Fringe events and was an awesome concert. It was a long afternoon event (5-11) but the venue is a good size and there is plenty to keep you occupied. It almost rained a couple of times but for the most part we managed to keep pretty dry. There is a shed-load of pictures on my flickr stream and a video of Dave rocking out – surprisingly good quality from my new camera.
Yay, woo.
Even though we were on the second row and one seat from the left of the auditorium this was still a fantastic movie. As always it has a superb, gritty, frantic feel about it. There’s always one stand out hand-to-hand fight in every Bourne film and this one is no exception. The fight choreography is exceptional, I think I forgot to breathe for the entire duration. I agree with Michael Heilemann’s comments though that it seems all CIA hitman have to be male models with man-bags.
The final scene nicely echoes back to the opening scene of the first film with Bourne once again floating in the water. Plus, for once it was a blockbuster that wasn’t blatantly fishing for a sequel at the end of the film.
Billy G is the ‘hood! I’m looking forward to seeing him tomorrow night.
I went for a nice ride along the canal this afternoon. Behold my route using the fancy new Google Maps embedding:
Business Reply Pamphlet. Fantastic!
Note: there are many different ways to to this. This is my personal approach.
Facebook provides RSS feeds for lots of things. One of these is the “Mini-feed” on your own profile. This can then further be filtered by “Status Stories” – this just being your own status updates in an RSS feed. Sounds promising…
Grab the URL for the RSS feed of this page. Now, we can’t just fopen() this URL in PHP as facebook are sneaky. They verify that the User-Agent is an actual browser or feed-reader. My approach was to use wget and it’s --user-agent parameter to pretend to be Internet Explorer. Dump the resulting XML somewhere and then parse out the inner HTML of the first <title> element. This is your current status. Easy.
Awesome. Reminds me of those diagrams in geography textbooks.